Big Idea: Hawking and Black Holes Book

Strathern somehow manages to work in several worhsipful mentions of Wittgenstein to this book on Hawking and the development of physics moving away from application to pure mental masturbation. He also soft-pedals Hawkings egotism (while acknowledging it in very polite terms), which seems vexing for an author who has little trouble harping on the slightest foibles of other historically important figures.
Most frustrating is the fact that this book was published in 1997, before Hawking had to effectively recant much of his work. This is not a shot a Hawking as a physicist, for most responsible for the great advances are guilty of overreach at some point. But it leaves a very incomplete picture, and too glowing one of the man who was willing to throw out accepted truths of physics just to get his equations to work (and not in any uniform manner, either).
It does a good job of providing a background for the work that Hawking has done and his importance in not just the field but general human understanding of the universe, but it delves too shallowly for any satisfaction.